[HN Gopher] Twilight of the Libraries: What Gets Lost When Books...
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Twilight of the Libraries: What Gets Lost When Books Go Off-Site
and Online (2022)
Author : laurex
Score : 46 points
Date : 2023-03-01 19:15 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thewalrus.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (thewalrus.ca)
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Keep in mind there's one other problem with digitization: a lack
| of ownership. The law does not recognize any concept of digital
| sale: all digital copies are licensed property of the
| publisher[0], and it is not possible to legally sell them. This
| gives publishers the ability to retroactively wipe libraries'
| catalogs on the basis that they own them.
|
| Yes, this isn't a problem with public domain works; but those
| have bigger preservation problems. DRM is a self-inflicted wound.
|
| [0] I resisted the urge to write "author" here as American
| copyright is assignable. It shouldn't be, because this
| assignability is usually demanded up-front by publishers.
| thomaslangston wrote:
| > This gives publishers the ability to retroactively wipe
| libraries' catalogs on the basis that they own them.
|
| This doesn't have to be true. We could have licenses that are
| perpetual.
| User23 wrote:
| > The law does not recognize any concept of digital sale
|
| The law does recognize a digital sale, including the right to
| resell and make archival copies. It turns out you can't trust
| the publisher's lawyers to give you good legal advice.
|
| For example you don't need a license to run software you have
| legally acquired a copy of. Black letter law already gives you
| that right in the copyright act[1].
|
| [1] https://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html
| HEmanZ wrote:
| I think the balance should be something like:
|
| - most libraries going the "modern" route the author doesn't
| like, because that's what most people really need from a library
|
| - some libraries keeping the "old school" approach for aesthetic
| and conservation reasons
|
| - hopefully one or two "super preserver" libraries that are
| stockpiling and preserving books just to be an exhaustive source
| of in case e.g the collapse of civilization or the occasional
| importance of some physical copy to future researchers.
|
| Does anyone know if #3 is happening?
|
| I'm totally fine with this, it seems the only practical approach
| going forward. And I say this as someone who loves physical books
| and probably owns more than I'll ever be able to read (over 10k
| at this point, I have a problem).
| crazygringo wrote:
| You could argue that #3 is the Library of Congress.
|
| And to a smaller extent (not everything, but all the main
| stuff), university collections at places like Harvard and Yale.
| Burper wrote:
| > Does anyone know if #3 is happening?
|
| I'd like to think denizens of HN would be aware of the
| existence of legal deposit libraries.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Welcome Burper.
|
| Legal deposit libraries are relatively rare - they can be
| e.g. one every 10 or 50 mil ppl, and sometimes the mandated
| time span of retention can be very limited.
|
| It is not granted that this practice will increase instead of
| decreasing or transforming.
| JohnFen wrote:
| None of those address the use case of regular people who want
| to read a physical book.
| Swizec wrote:
| Aren't the various national libraries of the world attempting
| to do #3? If I remember high school correctly, the idea of
| those libraries is to keep at least 1 copy of every book
| published in that nation.
| GoodbyeMrChips wrote:
| [dead]
| gpm wrote:
| #3 sounds like a reference library and/or a rare books library.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| [dead]
| blakesterz wrote:
| This story is from last summer, but it's still as relevant as
| ever. Things like this have been happening for a long time in
| libraries.
|
| This is from last month: Northern Vermont
| University, Castleton University, and Vermont Technical College
| are consolidating into one university, Vermont State University,
| by July 1st. As part of the consolidation, administrators
| announced they will be donating most of the library's physical
| collection in favor of a digital-only library and repurposing the
| library building.
|
| https://bookriot.com/vermont-state-university-digital-only-l...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Meanwhile, in my city, the public library is more popular than
| ever on any metric.
| [deleted]
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't get this article -- I do a lot of academic research and
| _love_ online materials. When I have to access a book that is
| physical only, half an entire afternoon gets wasted. Online books
| are orders of magnitude faster to get, to search within, and you
| can highlight and annotate to your heart 's delight.
|
| Everyone agrees rare books and manuscripts need to be kept, which
| the article admits, so that's not an issue.
|
| So ultimately the question is "regular books" and the crux of the
| article's argument seems to be:
|
| > _One glaring problem with libraries' increasing their reliance
| on digital texts is the relatively large number of errors in the
| Google Books corpus. As archivist Paul Conway has shown, "the
| imperfection of digital surrogates is an obvious and nearly
| ubiquitous feature of Google Books." But, even overlooking the
| outright errors in the scanned pages, my point is that "content"
| --what books contain--goes far beyond words in a particular order
| and beyond page images of a single representative copy. As we
| detach texts from books, we enable a certain range of procedures
| while disabling others. Online editions can offer up texts for
| investigation and discovery, but they are not replacements for
| the material they represent._
|
| This makes no sense to me. I've never seen an "error" in a Google
| Books page image. The OCR for sure, but who cares, and that can
| always be redone. And in terms of "enabling a certain range of
| procedures while disabling others", online enables a _ton_ ,
| while I'm at a total loss of what is "disabled". Again -- for
| rare books and manuscripts, of course. A beautiful gilt binding,
| absolutely. But for just your everyday workhorse books that make
| up 99+% of a library's content... I just totally and utterly fail
| to see _anything_ being lost _at all_. (And so many original
| covers /bindings are replaced with generic library
| covers/bindings when acquired, so it's not even _that_.)
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I just totally and utterly fail to see anything being lost at
| all.
|
| It sounds like you don't find ordinary physical books to be
| valuable. I am of the opposite opinion. Having them digitized
| and available online is a good thing, but losing access to the
| physical copies is a real loss to a number of people. The two
| primary things I can think of at the moment are...
|
| People who don't have access to the internet or have machines
| on which they can read electronic books. There are lots of such
| people.
|
| People who find that reading a physical book is simply a better
| reading experience than reading on the screen. I am one of
| those. Reading on a computer or tablet is fine for consulting
| reference material, but if I want to actually _read_ , quite a
| lot is lost by reading it on the screen. I've tried reading on
| screens, and it's just so uncomfortable that I can't do it and
| be happy about it. Which means that if I didn't have a physical
| copy, I'd probably just not read the book.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's always going to be cheaper for a library to lend
| internet/devices for reading than maintain a large physical
| collection for lending books.
|
| And then there's print-on-demand. You don't need a library
| for that. That's awesome that you personally love reading on
| a physical page, but that's not a reason to warehouse
| hundreds of millions of physical books that get checked out
| once a decade.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Well, I'm hardly alone in my preferences, but my point was
| to answer the question "what is being lost". I gave two
| examples of real things that are being lost.
|
| That loss may or may not be economically required -- but
| it's still a loss either way.
|
| > It's always going to be cheaper for a library to lend
| internet/devices for reading
|
| The economics of this may differ depending on where you
| are, but I'm 99% sure that this isn't the case where I am.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Virtually everwhere has cheap enough mobile data in 2023
| to read books with, so internet is not an issue.
|
| And I think you may be severly underestimating the cost
| of maintaining library-sized collections of books, in
| labor and utilities and maintenance and real estate.
| Consumer digital devices, especially things like e-ink
| readers, cost almost nothing compared to that.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > quite a lot is lost
|
| It doesn't have to be that way. If I was an ereader
| developer, there are a lot of things easily done to make it
| more physical book-like:
|
| 1. use scanned images, rather than reflowable text
|
| 2. render fonts that have subtle differences from one 'a' to
| the next 'a'
|
| 3. don't line the text up perfectly on the line
|
| 4. add an ink blotch here and there, and maybe a coffee ring
|
| 5. scan a blank page of real paper and use that as a
| background
|
| 6. scan a couple dozen of (5) and randomly use them
|
| 7. make the reader the size and shape of a pocketbook. I'm
| amazed that nobody does this. After all, they are "pocket"
| books, and ereaders don't fit in a pocket.
|
| 8. use a high res screen. While you don't really notice it
| consciously, a retina image of text is much easier on the
| eyes
|
| 9. make the ereader easily held and manipulated with one
| hand. Amazon's used to be like this, but then their
| "improved" models turned left and went over the embankment.
| The Kindle3 is the pinnacle of their ereaders
|
| 10. make an ereader display two facing pages at once. You
| know, like a book
|
| 11. make a larger ereader for the usual size of larger, non-
| pocketbook books. Even put a hinge between the two pages, so
| it opens and reads like a book
|
| 12. add the scent of paper to it. P.S. Some printed books
| smell like vomit. Don't emulate that.
|
| 13. have a "stack" of previous pages visited. So I can flip
| to another page, and reliably flip back to where I was
|
| 14. have a way to flip through the book, i.e. show pages
| sequentially, lingering on each for a second or so. Maybe
| have the flip speed sensitive to how hard you press the
| button
| duskwuff wrote:
| > The OCR for sure, but who cares, and that can always be
| redone.
|
| And that's only an issue at all for books which were scanned
| from print copies. Books which were uploaded in digital formats
| by the publisher won't have that issue.
| bombcar wrote:
| There are two types of research. There's the "academic" style
| where you know what you want and you want to get it, where
| online materials shine.
|
| Then there's the "browsing" type of research where you have an
| idea of what you want, and you go to a book on that, and you
| look at the books around it on the shelves; that's something
| you get from a library (or bookstore) that doesn't really
| happen online.
| specialist wrote:
| treasure hunt vs foraging.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's trivial to browse titles online if there's an interface
| for it.
|
| In fact, I find browsing related titles on Amazon to be a
| _tremendously_ quicker way to find related books than
| organzed by Dewey Decimal or similar at a library -- because
| collaborative recommendations, number of reviews, and actual
| review content are such strong signals that are totally
| absent in a library.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _to find relevant material_
|
| There you show the possibility of having selected an
| activity among many possible.
|
| Your expression suggests / _to seek_ /, ex IE _sag_ , "to
| track", which is not / _to search_ /, ex Lat _circare_ ,
| "look around" - to explore.
|
| Parts of the exploration (the complementary part of
| exploitation) is benefited by having a large amount of
| material in front of you, browsable. And having thousands
| of volumes at hand and immediately remains invaluable;
| electronic experience remains different.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I disagree -- electronic experience isn't different.
|
| You can build _any_ kind of interface for electronic
| "looking around" or "exploring" that you like.
|
| While in a physical library, you are limited entirely to
| a single fixed physical layout.
|
| There is nothing a physical library can do for exploring
| that can't be replicated on a computer. But a computer
| can add all sorts of incredible improvements.
|
| And why would you only want to have thousands of volumes
| at hand for immediate access, when you could have
| millions instead?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _I disagree ... experience isn 't different_
|
| Oh but you mustn't - because it is, it physically is. To
| simulate it, you would have to build a virtual reality
| system with a staggering resolution and FOV. Because a
| sauna and a jacuzzi are "not different" only to one
| perspective - and what is highlighted is the other one.
| You may say that one can get contented with one of them
| ways - and we are replying that it is not necessary.
| ...You can have both.
|
| > _And why would you only want to have thousands of
| volumes at hand for immediate access, when you could have
| millions instead_
|
| First of all, "Real" book repostitories can be in the
| order of the hundreds of thousands. Bookstores of that
| magnitude still exist (though rare), and libraries of the
| magnitude of millions are available.
|
| Contextually, practically instead: this side of the
| Atlantic many publishers work through collections - so,
| when you wanted to e.g. search through the Poetry
| collection of publisher Alpha, you will have in front of
| you a few hundreds or thousands items, publication #1 to
| #123 or #1 to #1234 for the whole publishing effort,
| curated by experts within the publishing house. I.e. you
| will have the complete set in front of you. (This is more
| valid for special locations than in general - in
| libraries, the Dewey system tends to break it.)
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _...You can have both._
|
| But at what cost?
|
| Frankly, I don't want my taxpayer dollars _or_ university
| tuition subsidizing the miniscule number of people who
| both want the "romance" of the stacks and actually use
| them regularly, when there's zero practical benefit over
| online versions.
|
| I'd _much_ rather those billions of dollars being spent
| on many thousands of libraries ' physical collections
| went to paying teachers and professors instead, for
| instance.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| And with the GPTs of the world, OCR is a vanishing issue.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Yes, instead of technical limitations of OCR, we'll have
| inscrutable language models making up random shit, and people
| too lazy to look at the primary source material.
| JohnFen wrote:
| How so? I don't understand at all.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| You know an OCR with a Statistical Language Model acting as
| text plausibility checker?
| hewlett wrote:
| They probably mean the use of GPTs to correct OCR errors
| mdp2021 wrote:
| ...Because if it meant "asking bots instead of reading",
|
| not only of course we want the real, original material to be
| available - and much intellectual activity will still involve
| reading, analyzing and studying it,
|
| but also, whenever actual artificial general intelligences
| will be available, they will be trained on said texts.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| The public libraries I know request a form of subscription to
| access digitized material, involving the use of public identity
| - linked to the accessed books. As opposed to "access the
| shelves, pick the item, read it in place".
|
| But some will deny personal data treatment, particularly in
| terms of matching accessed material and identity. So, general
| use of electronic documents through libraries will be off-limit
| to an important class of people. (Those who regard private
| intellectual activity as near top in the list of rightfully
| strictly private matters by principle.)
| crazygringo wrote:
| The public library I go to (NYPL) requires a proof of
| identity (driver's license, etc.) to get a library card which
| is required to check out material for use on-premises in a
| reading room.
|
| There is only a tiny fraction (< 1%) of material that any
| random person can just walk in and browse.
|
| And this is the case with _all_ reference libraries that I 'm
| aware of. (Edit: meant "research" library, mistyped
| "reference".)
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _that I 'm aware of_
|
| I want to reach your area to finally one day visit Bass'
| Strand;
|
| you should come to Europe one day and have the experience
| of free access to the shelves :)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Is there a research library (e.g. more than a million
| volumes) in Europe that you can browse most/all the
| collection of without even having to provide an ID card?
|
| In my experience, Europe tends to require mandatory ID
| for things in general _much_ more often than the US does.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| Storing books digitally may make them more available in the
| present, but it will also likely mean that they're be less
| available at some point in the future. Physical libraries with
| physical books have proven they can last for centuries,
| sometimes for millennia. For all we know, none of our digital
| storage media lasts significantly longer than decades, and even
| to pull that off, you have to constantly invest in copying and
| duplicating your data. Hard drives of the seventies, floppy
| disks, countless numbers of tape formats, CDs have all gone
| obsolete or are in the process of getting obsolete and are only
| accessible with dedicated hardware that would be very expensive
| to replicate from scratch, if even possible. A book does not
| have to be decoded to be read; even microfilm is more secure
| than an SSD or spinning HD when it comes to readability in the
| future in a low-tech / no-tech / replicated tech scenario. When
| the grid comes down, tap water will become scarce and digital
| written literature will just vanish.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The Vatican Library is full of old books that nobody has
| access to.
|
| The beauty of digital libraries is (if they are free) endless
| copies can be made. That's where real longevity stems from.
|
| Besides, to read one's digital library requires a tablet and
| a solar charger.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Storing books digitally may make them more available in the
| present, but it will also likely mean that they're be less
| available at some point in the future. Physical libraries
| with physical books have proven they can last for centuries,
| sometimes for millennia.
|
| I don't k kw about paper books lasting millennia. If you want
| to preserve books for millennia, you should carve them onto
| clay tablets and then bake them. The resulting baked clay
| tablets are pretty durable, even compared to the best paper.
| bell-cot wrote:
| THIS.
|
| Ask a real historian or research librarian about all the
| really important books that we know existed, _but do not
| have_ , because there was no Devout Brothers of Document
| Preservation faithfully maintaining copies of them through
| the centuries.
| crazygringo wrote:
| First of all, this is what the Library of Congress is for.
| Sure it's not a bad idea to have _one_ library with physical
| copies, or maybe even 2-3 or even 10, but we don 't need
| _thousands_ of them.
|
| But second, no, physical libraries generally _don 't_ last
| for centuries and certainly almost never for millenia. They
| get sold off, torn down, they burn down, and so on.
|
| On the other hand, you can keep an entire copy of Library
| Genesis on a home computer if you want. The sheer number of
| digital copies means none of this is going _anywhere_.
|
| And if the grid goes down and society is collapsing, then a
| collection of a good proportion of the world's books _on your
| hard drive_ powered by a generator is going to be infinitely
| more valuable than some physical library you have to hike for
| days to get to with a chance that raiders will kill you on
| the way. ;)
| hedora wrote:
| The main problem with digitization is that it facilitates
| censorship and forgery.
|
| We are already seeing a lot of this; especially in DRM'ed
| collections.
|
| If everyone just downloaded the entire library locally (this is
| completely feasible with consumer drives), and used some sort
| of snapshotting rsync, then this problem would go away.
|
| DRM prevents that, even for some public domain works.
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